Channel 4’s creative supremo, Jay Hunt, is delivering a pipeline of successful shows, including Gogglebox and The Mill. Andrew Billen finds out how she turned the station around
When I last interviewed Jay Hunt, Channel 4’s Chief Creative Officer, the context was crisis. She recalls the week, in July 2013, when Channel 5’s ratings beat Channel 4’s. It was a crisis only in the eye of certain beholders; it could be seen as a piece of statistical legerdemain from her old employers at 5.
At the time, if she was worried, the only hint was that she spoke at about a zillion words a minute. There were undoubtedly problems: topically, her summer crop of new shows had failed (including The Intern and Bedtime Live); structurally, her ageing daytime schedule was being crushed by BBC One, freed from the burden of children’s programming.
“When I saw you,” she says, talking a little more slowly now, in a meeting room at Channel 4’s Horseferry Road HQ, “it felt like it was hard to get stuff to land and yet I was very confident about the quality of what we were putting on air.
“Then this rather interesting thing happened. We got to the end of the year and there was this dawning realisation in the wider community that we had been putting out good shows.
“We topped The Guardian poll for best shows, did really well at the RTS Programme Awards and then the RTS Television Journalism Awards and then at the Baftas. That was amazing for the team, and a huge buzz personally, to see that recognition. But yes, it was an odd time.”
In fact, the very weekend after I saw her, Channel 4’s historical drama, The Mill, steamed into its Sunday-night slot with 2.8 million viewers, its biggest drama debut in three years.
The following week, she read the almost equally impressive overnights for the drama, Southcliffe, by a beautiful lake in Canada, where she was on a canoeing holiday with her husband, Ian Blandford, a presentation coach, her son and their daughter.
“I think it would be a bit weird if I didn’t care,” she says, when I raise an eyebrow.
Things kept on “landing”. Overall, viewing this year is down 2% compared with 2013 because daytime is still struggling and Hunt is still looking for a riposte. In peak, however, Channel 4 is up two points, the second-best terrestrial performer after BBC One. Benefits Street became a succès de scandale, Educating Yorkshire surpassed Educating Essex and, after two middling runs, Gogglebox became
a national institution.
“I think Gogglebox will ultimately become one of those case studies people talk about in the turnaround of a creative organisation, but it is a very Channel 4 story,” says Hunt.“It is a story about trying something and it not quite working, and finessing it and going back to the drawing board. It’s an idea that is so painfully simple.
“It could have been terrible and yet we grew it, and persisted with it and now it’s a massive hit and quite channel-defining.”
As for the controversially named Benefits Street, Love Productions’ documentary series set in a poor Birmingham suburb, it was criticised on the Left for demonising benefit receivers. Hunt appears delighted that it busted the notion that “we have a consistently liberal agenda”, while bringing millions, including young viewers, to a hot political issue, not least through its “noisy” title.
After a quiet first half of the year for drama, with the weird and violent Utopia doing, as she jokes, “discreetly” in the ratings, the coming months look splashy.
Highlights include: Indian Summer (“more edge” than The Jewel in the Crown); Russell T Davies’s Cucumber, “exploring the passions and pitfalls of 21st-Century gay life”; the police satire, Babylon; and Cut, starring Fresh Meat’s Zawe Ashton.
James Graham, who wrote about the 1970s Lib-Lab pact in This House for the National Theatre, has been commissioned to write Coalition – not, she insists, “The Trial of Nick Clegg”, but a dramatisation of his decision to go into coalition with David Cameron.
Still on politics, Hunt has been talking to Jeremy Paxman, a hero from her Newsnight days in the 1990s. “I think he still has a sense of danger about him, which is quite unusual on television, and if we could find something that works for him on Channel 4, I think he’d be a good fit.”
This all should be enough, you would think, to make Hunt – commissioner of Sherlock and Mrs Brown’s Boys (when she ran BBC One) – one of the most esteemed executives in television.
She is fun to meet, warm, a youthful 47. Yet here is a strange thing: maybe I mix in the wrong circles, but I hear little spontaneous praise for her, and some griping: rumours of staff bollockings, memories of her raising her voice as editor of the BBC Six O’Clock News, accusations of a lack of strategic thought.
Her CEO, David Abraham, in an interview with me in Television last year, wondered if there might be sexism at work here – but there are, and have been, other woman channel controllers.
If true, it would be ironic, for “hating women” was one of the charges thrown at her by Miriam O’Reilly when the presenter was taken off Countryfile.
Hunt says she has expressed her “regret” to O’Reilly, but neither face to face nor in writing, she admits.
“Hand on heart,” she says, “that has never been any beat of my personality. One thing I feel very strongly is that it is absolutely vital we reflect the audience that we serve.”
Hunt has had other vocal detractors. One is the BBC’s Controller of Comedy Commissioning, Shane Allen. In 2012, at a highly charged leaving party from Channel 4, where he was her head of comedy, he distributed T-shirts with the slogan, “End the Hunt”.
“To be honest, I find that whole episode slightly bewildering, but it’s ended in a happy place. We’ve got a fantastic head of comedy [Phil Clarke], of whom I think very highly.”
The other dissenter was Charlie Parsons, creator of Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast, who alleged that she micromanaged the fun out of working for the channel, and accused the station of dictation rather than collaboration with independents.
She says she has the advantage of knowing what the feedback was from the sector before she arrived from BBC One in 2011.
“To be blunt, predating me, it wasn’t great,” Hunt insists. “There were people complaining about cosy deals with former commissioners; they couldn’t get through the door; there was a preferred list of suppliers; it was incredibly difficult if you were an out-of-London indie to get in.”
Channel 4 now works with more than 400 companies, with more than half of commissions going outside London. “I manage a large team. At any given point there might be one conversation that didn’t go quite the way someone wanted it to, or they were rejected when they didn’t expect to be rejected, or there’s a tiny piece of discourtesy that’s crept into that relationship.
“I’m sure there are instances like that, but we have put in place really stringent behaviours about getting back to people and not cancelling people when they’re halfway down the M1.”
The stick she gets in general comes down, she suggests, to her length of service as Controller, from 2005 onwards, first of BBC daytime, then, briefly, Channel 5, then BBC One, from 2008 to 2010.
She will have said “no” to an awful lot of people – and still has to. “But I look at where the channel is now and how far we’ve come.
“When I got here, three years ago, there was a barren cupboard in terms of development, with 200 hours of Big Brother gone missing in action. And now there’s been almost a year of real signs of renewal, strong brands coming in across the board. That is achieved by hard work and by being brave enough to sometimes say no.”
Is she abrasive with her senior staff? “I don’t think so.”
Every Tuesday morning she holds a 90-minute meeting with her top team, just talking about ideas. “That’s become a really vibrant part of how this organisation works.”
And she can be persuaded to change her mind? “First Dates is a very good example. It was a show I couldn’t quite see how it was going to land. Nick Mirsky [Deputy Head of Factual] hadn’t been here very long but was absolutely determined he wanted to make it.
“I think it’s a really clever little show, actually, and it’s a show I have persisted with and backed.”
If Channel 4 does have a collegiate controller, the trait may run in the family. Her father, John, is Emeritus Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School.
If, on the other hand, she can be abrasive, we should remember she is from an outspoken nation: “I’m afraid I am 100% Australian.”
Born in Sydney, she lived there until she was 13, when her father’s work took him to Pittsburgh and then Crete. She did not watch much UK television as a child, “although, funnily enough, if you attend enough dinner parties in this country then in the end you can talk convincingly about Mr Benn having never seen it.”
She read English at Cambridge. At the “milk round” in her final year, her options appeared to be the law or accountancy.
Neither appealed and she briefly returned to Australia, where she blagged her way into a small media agency. Her nine-month stint was sufficiently close to journalism for her to want to return to England and work for the BBC, where she rose through news, becoming Editor of the One O’Clock News in 2000.
Editing the Six, however, she realised she was becoming as interested in production techniques as the headlines.
People thought I’d lost my tiny mind [when] I said… I’m going to go and do make-over shows
“I was editing the most-watched news programme in Britain and then I was offered a job moving sideways into daytime. People looked at me as though I’d had a lobotomy. They thought I’d lost my tiny mind and I said, ‘No, I’m going to go and do make-over shows and look after Call My Bluff’, which was the most cerebral thing we had on the slate at the time. But it was absolutely critical to what I then went on to do.
“I loved being in news, I always say to people it’s a fantastic discipline. Basic storytelling and understanding the beats of journalism is vital in all sorts of aspects of working in TV.
“But to then be released from that and to be able to play in a much more open way and to experiment with scripted and to do some of the crazy entertainment shows I’ve been involved with over the years, that’s amazingly freeing. I feel lucky to have had that chance.”
I ask her one final question, about where her self-confidence, not to say her thick skin, comes from. Her resilience, she answers, has been built up over years of weathering storms, but I am wrong about her self-confidence.
“I constantly look into my soul and ask myself if I’m getting this right. I wouldn’t want to be any other way, because I think you need to have the humility to know when you’re getting things right and when you’re getting things wrong. I think that makes you a better leader, actually.”
Jay Hunt: a life in TV
Jacqueline Leigh Hunt, Chief Creative Officer, Channel 4
Born Sydney, Australia, 20 January 1967. Her father, John Hunt, was a university professor; her mother, Wendy, deceased, worked in PR
Married Ian Blandford, TV coach, in 2005; one daughter and one son
Lives Clapham, London
Recreation Travel, running, cycling
Education Lady Eleanor Holles School, London; St John’s, Cambridge
1989 Joins BBC
1990 Assistant Editor, Breakfast News
1994 Output Editor, Newsnight
1999 Editor, One O’Clock News
2003 Editor, Six O’Clock News
2005 Controller of Daytime
2007 Head of Programmes, Channel 5
2008 Controller, BBC One
2011 Joins Channel 4 as CCO
Hits – BBC Great British Menu, Heir Hunters, Sherlock, Luther, Mrs Brown’s Boys, moving Countryfile to Sunday nights
Hits – Five Cowboy Builders, Extreme Fishing
Hits – Four Gogglebox, Educating Yorkshire, The Undateables, Live from Space, The Island with Bear Grills, The Jump, Benefits Street, Run, Southcliffe, The Mill, My Mad Fat Diary
Misses The Intern, Bedtime Live, Ben Earl: Trick Artist, Compare Your Life
What her goggleboxers are watching ‘My son loves The Big Bang Theory and my daughter is into This Old Thing.’
On Gogglebox ‘I’ve never had a better insight into the sofas of Great Britain.’
On BBC Three ‘I’m not delighted it’s closing. I think it’s important there’s great public service telly for a young audience, a role that we fulfil [at E4] very well.’
